Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, January 26, 1999

La Salle reached mouth of Mississippi River in 1682

by Jim Bradshaw

Frank Waddell, a New Orleans surveyor, heard that a Cajun trapper who lived deep in the marshland of the Louisiana delta had found an ancient plaque made of lead and inscribed in Latin.

Waddell rushed down to the delta to see it. He found the trapper. The trapper said yes, he'd found a plaque like that.

"Where is it? Can I see it?" Waddell asked.

"No," the Cajun said. "You've come a little too late. I've already cut it up to make sinkers for my fishing lines."

By La Salle's time, Louisiana's Acadian progenitors were well settled in old Acadia. Most of them were farm-folk, tied peacefully to lands handed down from fathers to sons. As the Acadian population grew, new lands and settlements were opened and they prospered.

The Joliet-Marquette journey inspired La Salle to explore the country that would be named Louisiana. As a young man, he quit the seminary to find his fortune in New France. He dreamed of a French empire stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic north. He wanted to build a colony on the Gulf to control the Mississippi River and the Gulf Coast. He wanted to control the Mississippi Valley so that British settlers on the Atlantic could not move to the west and, with a base on the Gulf coast, France would have a foothold there in case of war with Spain.

As La Salle saw it, with a colony on the Gulf and control of the Mississippi Valley, France could build a series of forts that would control the heartland of America. The Mississippi River would give fur traders a warm water port on the Gulf when winter froze rivers and lakes in frigid Canada. In fact, there could be a series of trading posts linking Acadia and New France, settlements on the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes, then down the Mississippi River, and on to French-held Caribbean Islands such as Saint-Domingue.

He clinched the deal with the French court in 1677 when he suggested that his scheme would not only hold the British behind the Appalachians and establish a French trading empire in North America, but that it would also provide the bases needed to capture a few Mexican silver mines from Spain.

After descending the frozen Illinois River by sled, La Salle and 23 other Frenchmen, 18 Indians, and assorted followers, entered the Mississippi River on Feb. 23, 1682, and began paddling south. Francis Parkman tells us in his essay, " The Success of La Salle," "The Indians insisted on taking their squaws with them." These were ten in number, besides three children. Thus, the expedition included 54 persons, of whom some were useless and some were a burden.

"La Salle had abandoned ... his original plan of building a vessel for the navigation of the Mississippi," Parkman continues. "Bitter experience had taught him the difficulty of the attempt, and he resolved to trust to his canoes alone. ... On the sixth of February, they issued upon the majestic bosom of the Mississippi. Here, for the time, their progress was stopped, for the river was full of ice."

They passed the mouth of the Red River on March 31. After another 100 miles, the explorers found themselves ducking a shower of arrows sent their way by Quinipissa Indians from the cast bank of the river near Lake Pontchartrain. Then the river swept them past what is now Metairie and Gretna, Canal Street and the Vieux Carré, and on around an enormous bend.

According to Parkman, "With every stage of their adventurous progress, the mystery of this vast New World was more and more unveiled. More and more they entered the realms of spring. The hazy sunlight, the warm and drowsy air, the tender foliage, the opening flowers, betokened the reviving life of Nature. For several days more they followed the writhings of the great river, on its tortuous course through wastes of swamp and canebrake, till on the thirteenth of March they found themselves wrapped in a thick fog. Neither shore was visible, but they heard on the right the booming of an Indian drum and the shrill outcries of the war dance. La Salle at once crossed to the opposite side, where, in less than an hour, his men threw up a rude fort of felled trees. Meanwhile, the fog cleared; and from the farther bank, the astonished Indians saw the strange visitors at their work. Some of the French advanced to the edge of the water and beckoned them to come over. Several of them approached, in a wooden canoe, to within the distance of a gunshot. La Salle displayed the calumet, and sent a Frenchman to meet them. He was well received; and the friendly mood of the Indians being now apparent, the whole party crossed the river. On landing, they found themselves at a town of the Kappa band of the Arkansas, a people dwelling near the mouth of the river which bears their name."

As La Salle's party continue to the south, the river began to change from fresh water to brackish. Then, it turned salty as the expedition moved out the Mississippi delta toward the Gulf. The long search ended on April 6, 1682, when La Salle reached the Head of Passes, that point where the river splits into fingers that spill into the sea.

That night, according to the explorer's nephew, Nicolas de La Salle, they camped "some three leagues from the mouth of the river." They spent the next two days exploring its outlets.

On the morning of April 19, they erected a post and cross, buried the lead plaque claiming Louisiana for France, chanted the Te Deum and Exaudiat and the Domine Salvum fac regum, fired their guns, and shouted "Vive le roi!"

Then, according to the nephew's account, La Salle, in a "loud and audible voice," took possession of the country known as Louisiana.

He told all who could hear: "In the name of the most high, mighty, invincible, and victorious Prince, Louis the Great, by the grace of God King of France and of Navarro, Fourteenth of that name, I this ninth day of April, one thousand six hundred and eighty-two, in virtue of the commission of his Majesty which I hold in my hand, and which may be seen by all whom it may concern, have taken, and do now take, in the name of his Majesty and of his successors to the crown, possession of this country of Louisiana, the seas, harbors, ports, bays, adjacent traits, and all the nations, peoples, provinces, cities, towns, villages, mines, minerals, fisheries, streams, and rivers, within the extent of the said Louisiana, from the mouth of the great river St. Louis, otherwise called the Ohio ... as also along the river Colbert, or Mississippi, and the rivers which discharge themselves there into, from its source beyond the country of the Nadouessioux ... as far as its mouth at the sea, or Gulf of Mexico, and also to the mouth of the River of Palms, upon the assurance we have had from the natives of these countries, that we are the first Europeans who have descended or ascended the said river Colbert; hereby protesting against all who may hereafter undertake to invade any or all of these aforesaid countries, peoples, or lands, to the prejudice of the rights of his Majesty, acquired by the consent of the nations dwelling herein. Of which, and of all else needful, I hereby take to witness those who hear me, and demand an act of the notary here present."

Parkman tells us, "On that day, the realm of France received on parchment a stupendous concession. The fertile plains of Texas; the vast basin of the Mississippi, from its frozen northern springs to the sultry borders of the Gulf, from the woody ridges of the Alleghenies to the bare peaks of the Rocky Mountains -- a region of savannahs and forests, sun-cracked deserts, and grassy prairies, watered by a thousand rivers, ranged by a thousand warlike tribes, passed beneath the scepter of the Sultan of Versailles; and all by virtue of a feeble human voice, inaudible at half a mile."

As it would turn out, the invincible, victorious, etc., Louis the Great of France would be less than impressed by this claiming and naming of the territory of Louisiana . He had heard talk of the Mississippi Valley and its potential for a decade or more, and had been bored by it from the beginning. He was preoccupied with moving his huge bureaucracy and elegant court from the Louvre to Versailles, where his workmen (36,000 of them) labored to get his palace ready for a proper grand opening.